The Circle (62 page)

The memory opened out then, suddenly, and he was no longer remembering but
there
in the water, gripped by the icy pincers, watching floating flame close in on him. Trying to swim in the blackness without air. The sea choked him, battered him, numbed him, then caught fire. His hands when he raised them were black with oil. A man screamed beyond the wall of flame, and his throat closed. The screaming man was himself; he was still screaming, and he would never stop.

When, sweating and rigid, he forced his eyes open, hers were closed. “Do you have to put all your weight on me?” she said.

He shuddered, unable to speak through a throat soldered shut with horror. His erection had died inside her. Her vagina expelled him. He rolled away, desperate for air.

“Dan, what is it? Are you all right?”

“Nothing,” he gasped.

He heard her getting up. The soft, heavy pad of her feet. Her nightdress whispered.

He lay rigid, listening. He knew now what he'd wanted. Not sex, but reassurance he was still alive. The bed creaked and he glanced over. She lay motionless, staring away from him at the clock on the nightstand.

“What's eating you? Are you mad at me?”

“I'm just tired of this.” She stared at the clock. “I'm tired of not knowing, tired of Navy secrets, just tired. And yes, I'm mad at you. I'm very angry.”

“What for? Do you think the collision was my fault?”

“Fuck the
collision,
Dan! I'm glad you got out. I said that! But it was—when you went away like that, just a phone call and you were gone, I was all alone in Newport. I didn't know anybody, not one person I could call for help. I know it's not your fault. But God knows the Navy doesn't care, so I'm mad at you. It may not be logical, but damn it, that's how I feel.”

He did not see at all. “Yes,” he said.

“And another thing, I've been thinking about it now, I don't like being fucked when I'm not ready. I don't like it at all.”

“I didn't hear any major objections.”

“I thought I might want to once you started. Anyway, I said I wasn't interested. What am I supposed to do, scream?” Her voice rose. “Don't ever do that again. I'm your wife, not a goddamned piece of meat with a convenient hole in it!”

“I see,” he said. The need for sympathy slid away and something cold as the sea took its place. “I don't think that's a very constructive attitude. My friends died, I almost died, and I wanted you. You've treated me like a crippled stranger since I got back. You don't know what we went through.”

She stared at the clock silently.

“Being left alone like that, like you say—You knew what being a Navy wife meant. We discussed it before we got married. You said, as I recall, that you wouldn't mind being by yourself from time to time. That it would give you time to work on your degree.”

“It's different doing it. Maybe it's different after years of it. I haven't … we haven't spent a week in the same house. I'm eight months pregnant, but I don't feel married yet. I feel closer to Moira than I do to you.”

Moira, he remembered with an effort, was her ex-roommate. “That's a great thing to say.”

“It's true. You bottle everything up, I wouldn't be surprised to hear your brains fizzing. That rigid Academy bullshit … I don't know if I can go on with you if you're so … so cold. With the baby coming … Jesus, I feel so alone.”

“You know,” he said slowly, “when I was in the water, when I thought I was going to die, I was praying. But I wasn't praying to God. Maybe it sounds blasphemous, but I was praying to you, that you would help me. And when that guy held me up, and I thought I might live another few minutes, I thought you had answered me.”

She put her hand over her eyes. “Jesus,” she whispered.

“I'm sorry, Susan. I do love you, so much.”

The wrenching sound of her breathing told him she was crying. He groped to his blouse and handed her his handkerchief.

In the dim light from the window, from the city, she got up from the bed. She stumbled away. Then she turned, awkward and huge and swollen, and came back to him. He held her tightly, ignoring the scream from his burned shoulder. They clung to each other angrily, despairingly, hopelessly, like castaways in a stormswept sea, not knowing whether there is rescue ahead or only the last and final darkness.

25

WHEN he left the lobby the next morning, six inches of snow covered the ground. Not a taxi was stirring in the District of Columbia. By the time he found a Checker he was already late. At the Pentagon he limped up the ramp hurriedly, flashing his pass at the security guard. It was tougher persuading the marines to let him in the courtroom.

But finally they did. As he took a seat in back, realizing belatedly that he'd forgotten his morning pill, a tall, balding, slightly stooped man in service dress blue was being sworn in. “State your name, rank, branch of service, and present duty station,” Johnstone was droning.

“Leonard A. Hoelscher,” the tall man said quietly to the three members of the Court. Dan saw that the broad gold on his sleeves matched theirs. Only Ausura, the president, outranked him. “Rear admiral, USN. Present duty station, commander, Carrier Division 42.”

Q
. State your duty station on 25 December, sir.

A
. I was Commander Task Group 21.1 in the eastern Atlantic, aboard USS
KENNEDY.

Q
. Under whose control were you operating?

A
. I was under operational control of Commander, Second Fleet, for operation WESTERN VIGIL, an exercise to test the defenses of a carrier strike group.

At this point the Court sat with closed doors. Witnesses not party to the proceedings withdrew from the courtroom.

Q
. I show you this document. Is it the plan under which you and the ships under your command were operating?

A
. Yes, it is.

The document was submitted to the parties and the Court as evidence. There being no objection, it was admitted as Exhibit D.

Q
. Now, on the day in question, who was in tactical command of USS
RYAN?

A
. Commanding officer,
KENNEDY
was in tactical command of all the accompanying units.

Q
. Under your orders?

A
. That is correct.

Q
. Where were you, sir, in the ship, from about 2200 the night before to the time of the collision?

A
. I was in flag plot most of that time, though I went to the bridge once to speak to Captain Javits.

Q
. Will you please recount the events of the early morning of the 25th, up to the moment of the collision with
RYAN,
with particular attention to the orders you gave?

A
. As I said, I was directing the air battle from flag plot. I was in contact with
KENNEDY
's bridge, and we had a remote pritac speaker in the plot. We launched an air strike about 2200 on the 24th. The first wave reported inbound at about 0145. Jake, Captain Javits, got that word at the same time from Air Control. As I recall, there were no specific orders given to him as to course to recover and so forth. There are standard operating procedures for this sort of thing, and he was following them.

Q
. Were you kept informed of his movements?

A
. That is standard procedure.

Q
. By what means?

A
. Intercom from the bridge.

Q
. Did you concur with his intentions and movements?

A
. Yes, I did.

Q
. Do you feel in retrospect that he acted correctly?

A
. I have to say I do.

Q
. Would you have given different orders in his position?

A
. In retrospect, perhaps. But in retrospect we are all a lot wiser.

Q
. Please go on. Will you tell the court what signals you heard before the collision?

A
. I heard the corpen—the new course—signal go out. I heard the units receipt for it and I believe I recall
RYAN
coming back and asking about taking plane guard. I recall that because it was sloppy of
KENNEDY
's conning officer to overlook it. But I thought no more about it. Then I heard the change left to two-five-zero.

Q
. What signal was that?

A
.
KENNEDY
modified her recovery course to two-five-zero instead of two-six-zero, her original intention. The wind had shifted slightly.

Q
. This has not been brought out in previous testimony. At what time did this signal go out?

A
. I'm not sure.

Q
. Did the ships in company acknowledge this signal?

A
. I believe I heard acknowledgments, but I can't recall which units responded.

Q
. Is there a radio log that would have these transmissions and the responses to them?

A
. There is a log, but as to completeness you would have to examine it.

Q
. All right, sir. Go on.

A
. Well, things happened pretty quickly after that. I heard the whistle go and called the bridge immediately; at the same time, they were calling me, and we got a little fouled up for a minute on the intercom. Then a shudder went through the ship. By that time, we had got comms straightened out and Jake told me what was happening. I went out and saw that we had run over
RYAN.

Q
. Go on.

A
. Well, our first thought was of rescue, and I put out orders to the screen to break off exercise play and pick up survivors. I checked on the remaining time our planes had—I had to think of them—and they still had about twenty minutes or half an hour of fuel; so I ordered them to orbit till further word.

Next priority was damage to the carrier. Jake had been getting reports and it sounded like we had come through okay except for a sheared fuel line. No shaft damage, which was what had me worried, though I knew she was Newport News—built and pretty hard to hurt.

At that time we were turning, and Jake and I were discussing the situation, and it occurred to us that we had a dangerous situation. The forward part of the destroyer was on fire. Now, I knew her loadout.

Q
. Please elaborate.

A
.
RYAN
had an operational combat loadout with both conventional torpedoes and nuclear depth bombs for her Asroc. I believe from her reporting-in data that she had five of them aboard. The nukes on that class of destroyer are stored in a locked magazine in what used to be a hangar. We could see that area was a mass of fire.

Well, this was a difficult decision. I knew three things. First, there were men in the water and on the ship. Second, these weapons are vulnerable to fire. Not exceptionally so, but if they're roasted for a while, they'll react.

Q
. The nuclear weapons?

A
. Yes. We wouldn't have had a nuclear explosion per se, but if the conventional explosive in the triggers went off, or if the torpedoes stored with them detonated, we'd have had a big plume of material in the air. The wind, as I have said, was from the west. We were only a couple of hundred miles off Ireland. I was scared we'd get that explosion, that plume, and it would of course be carried straight off to the east.

I had to make a command decision. I tried to call
RYAN
but got no response. I had no way of knowing whether they had flooded that magazine, and it sounds now as if they hadn't. My decision, and I knew at the time it would cost lives, was to bring
KENNEDY
around and push the burning section underwater as quickly as I could. That would put out the fire, and once under water, those warheads would be safe.

I discussed this briefly with Javits. He too was reluctant, but he agreed. We sealed the ship up in case the nukes went off around us, and went around at full speed and got it over with.

I've spent a lot of time since thinking about it, second-guessing myself. I still think it was a single-solution problem. I couldn't take the risk, politically or, you might say, in a humanitarian way, of putting a fallout plume over Donegal and Belfast.

Q
. Please continue.

A
. Well, after that we vectored the small boys in to pick up survivors.
KENNEDY
went on west and recovered her strike. Then I launched search-and-rescue helos. We continued area search until noon the next day, when I got orders to discontinue the exercise and put the survivors ashore.

Q
. Admiral Hoelscher, what in your opinion caused the collision?

A
. I have not heard all the testimony before this Court. However, from my understanding of events, I think the captain or conning officer of
RYAN
made a mistake in maneuvering that neither
RYAN
nor
KENNEDY
had time to rectify.

Cross-examined by counsel for Commander Packer.

Q
. Sir, I have two points I'd like to explore. The first is whether or not you were in operational command of the formation.

A
. As I said, Captin Javits was in tactical command.

Q
. I understand, but on a carrier, it is common for flag and commanding officers to work closely together. You have testified that you were in almost continuous communication with the bridge.

A
. That's so, but at the same time I was responsible for many other things. The maneuvering of units of the task group was specifically delegated to Javits.

Q
. But you remained responsible and exercised close supervision.